5 October 2010 | Press release

ClientEarth welcomes recent commitments from the UK, Scotland, Norway, Denmark and Germany to better manage the fisheries of the North Sea, addressing the wasteful practice of discarding fish.

On Friday October 1, fishing ministers from the four states signed a declaration marking the culmination of the North Sea Conference on Fisheries Management in Ardoe House, Aberdeen. The Ardoe declaration calls for fundamental changes to fisheries management to secure the long-term sustainability of North Sea fish stocks. ClientEarth supports all the declaration’s objectives and particularly endorses a number of crucial elements which reflect some of ClientEarth’s own fundamental goals for EU fisheries reform and sustainable fisheries. These include:

• refocusing quotas on fish caught, rather than landed;support for fully documented fisheries
• the need for a discard ban (although ClientEarth is calling for a wider discard ban going beyond cod and associated species)
• close regional cooperation and co-ordination between states to develop collaborative regional fisheries plans and integration with other marine sectors
• setting incentives and empowering fishers to be more selective and more sustainable in their fishing practices
• the need for data collection and the involvement for fishers in this process

ClientEarth is working to help see the declaration translated into a concrete legislative framework and calling for the central role of fishers to be recognised in achieving these aims.
 
Sandy Luk, marine lawyer at ClientEarth, said: “The ambition of this declaration is necessary to achieve sustainable fishing in the North Sea. This commitment to establishing controls on the total amounts of fish netted and a discard ban sends a clear message for rational fisheries management, rather than the current quotas for fish landed with their perverse incentives to discard.” 

The Ardoe Declaration’s recommendations closely mirror the sustainable fisheries management system that ClientEarth has been advocating. ClientEarth developed the Fishing Credits System (FCS) together with the Marine Conservation Society and welcomes the calls of the Ardoe Declaration’s authors for pilots of innovative measures and regional management model, which includes cooperation between industry, scientists and administrations and which improve data on fish stocks. The FCS has exactly those aims and lends itself to such pilots.

ENDS

Notes to editors

 ? The full text of the Ardoe Declaration is available here: http://www.fishnewseu.com/latest-news/scottish/4386-ministers-commit-to-reduce-discards-in-ardoe-declaration.html

? The Fishing Credits System (FCS) is a regionalised fisheries management system that introduces a new type of mixed catch quota by assigning each fish species credits. Fishers can choose what they catch, and in what quantity, provided they don’t exceed their total credits allowance. A proportion of the credits could be traded between active fishers. The FCS would mean fishers wouldn’t need to worry about exceeding their quota for specific species and would no longer have to dump their catch for going ‘over-quota’ on one species.  ClientEarth developed the system in collaboration with the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).
Details of the Fishing Credits System are available here

? For further comment and analysis contact:
Mike Haines | Communications officer | t. +44(0) 207 749 5978 | m. +44 (0)7538 418 460 | This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
George Leigh | Communications officer | t. +44(0) 203 030 5951 | This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

? ClientEarth is a non-profit environmental law organisation based in London, Brussels and Warsaw. We are lawyers working at the interface of law, science and policy.  Using the power of the law, we develop legal strategies and tools to address major environmental issues. As legal experts working in the public interest, we act to strengthen the work of our partners - both governments and NGOs. www.clientearth.org